Welcome to The Morning Pride, ThinkProgress LGBT’s daily round-up of the latest in LGBT policy, politics, and some culture too! Here’s what we’re reading this morning, but please let us know what stories you’re following as well.

A new Quinnipiac poll has found that a plurality of Pennsylvania voters support marriage equality, with 47 percent in favor and 43 percent opposed. As has been the case in other states, support is stronger among women (50-40), Democrats (65-27), and independent voters (51-38). Currently, Pennsylvania does not offer any form of legal recognition for same-sex couples

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics. But I am a Republican no longer.

The Republican Party’s war on Democratic voting blocks is like a game of three-dimensional chess in which their strategies are intended to remain dormant until Election Day, and in the following days when votes are officially counted. But their game plan is simple. They want to discourage voters by complicating every step for new and existing voters from specific blue cohorts, such as students, poor people and minorities

Chicago teachers could hardly be more united in their disgust at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s assault on public education. More than 98 percent voted to authorize a strike, which union activists say is as much about defending students and parents as it is about the economics of their contract. And while school has already started in the Windy City, the nation’s third largest school system could be shut down by next week, setting off a confrontation between a militant rank-and-file teacher movement and the mainstream of the labor movement and its allies, the Democratic Party

On a Saturday afternoon last February, journalist Carl Bernstein got up on stage at the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan and delivered a speech questioning the listing of an obscure Iranian group called the Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK) on the U.S.

Want more on contemporary culture and gender roles? Visit Role/Reboot . Until I left for college when I was 17, I had this weird tendency to look out the window of my bedroom at the parking lot of the movie store across the street from our house, to see if the store was closed yet.

So as Democrats gather to launch the stretch run of the 2012 election cycle, those Foxy “friends” of the Donkey Party, Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, take advantage of one last opportunity to tell their former compatriots they should make a U-turn and embrace their inner Paul Ryan. And they do so, of course, in that go-to authority for all progressives, the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal . Drawing on their many years of experience, Caddell and Schoen offer this brilliant analysis of the race: What voters are looking for—and particularly what swing Â­voters, independents, and disillusioned Obama voters are looking for—is a new direction for America based on fiscal discipline, a balanced budget, and economic growth and leadership.

The following story first appeared on Jezebel.com. It’s enraging how mainstream media outlets like Today and People treat the Duggars as though they’re just an ordinary family with an extraordinary amount of children — and aren’t they so cute! — when in fact, they are not. Yes, they’re bigots and anti-choice and weird and they subscribe to the kind of traditional gender roles that most educated people would consider “sexist.” But all of those things, however detestable, are essentially personal opinions

As a scientist who studies sex, and as a sex educator (I teach college-level human sexuality classes at Indiana University and have written the Kinsey Institute’s sex information column, and other sex columns, for the past decade), it’s my job to puzzle over sex and to find answers. Among the numerous questions about desire/libido, penis size, lasting longer and the many variations of “am I ______” (fill in the blank with: pregnant, “normal,” bisexual, doomed to a life without sex), some of the most commonly asked questions have to do with women’s orgasm. Although orgasm isn’t everything, it’s important to most people at least some of the time.

Bill Moyers talks with Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican who describes the modern dysfunction of both the Republican and Democratic parties. In Lofgren’s view, Republicans have become overly obsessed with obstructing President Obama, and the Democrats suffer from political complacency. Lofgren’s new book is The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

Sharon Day, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, asserted at the opening of her party’s national conference last week: “[This] is the most important election in our nation’s lifetime.” Well, it depends. That probably isn’t true if your number-one issue of concern is drone attacks, the endless conflict in Afghanistan, the drug war, civil liberties, or the seemingly endless expansion of executive power. None of these are minor issues and the parties presently do not differ greatly on any of them.

Attacks on hard-working people are nothing new in America. Sixty-five years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady and architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, wrote these words : “Labor Day this year is not a day for rejoicing for the labor groups, or for those who are interested in good labor conditions throughout the nation.” In 1947 she was worried about the Taft-Hartley Act, which was the first major legislation to weaken unions since the New Deal. The rights of the people who drive the economy and form the backbone of the country were under siege.

Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter, has become perhaps the foremost media scribe and most prolific advocate of a need for revolutionary change in our current institutional oppression and control of the government by the oligarchical and political elite.

The Right’s propaganda machine has been on overdrive during the Republican National Convention trying desperately to repackage the Romney-Ryan team as “compassionate conservatives.” But there is a curious counterpoint to the nonsense we’ve heard from the podium coming from another slice of the Right’s noise machine—an emphasis on how scary a second Obama term would be.

There are no comparisons to be made. This is not like war or plague or a stockmarket crash. We are ill-equipped, historically and psychologically, to understand it, which is one of the reasons why so many refuse to accept that it is happening

Israelis are being sold on war with Iran in more ways than one. In a commercial featuring John Cleese (a veteran of the zany British comedy shows, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers ), a high level general takes a taste of a delectable chocolate and hazelnut spread and inadvertently sets in motion an Israeli military strike on an unnamed country — Iran by implication and context — a command that the Israelis have been waiting for and are eager to carry out

Editor’s note: Portions of this article are reproduced or adapted from Better Off Without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession . For large chunks of the last two years I traveled through Dixie doing research for a book called Better Off Without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession (published this month by Simon & Schuster). Wherever I went in the South I was called a socialist

Co-authored by Jesse Lava When will the United States start thinking beyond bars? This nation is now spending over $200 billion a year on a justice system that locks up more people than any country on earth . We have more prisoners than China.

We might wish the uproar from the convention halls of both parties these busy weeks were the wholesome clamor of delegates deliberating serious visions of how we should be governed for the next four years. It rises instead from scripted TV spectacles — grown-ups doing somersaults of make-believe — that will once again distract the public’s attention from the death rattle of American democracy brought on by an overdose of campaign cash

“My very first survivor was a boy. How many of us are looking for boys?” –Sandra Morgan, Director, Global Center for Women & Justice at Vanguard University His legs were thin as faded whispers and dangled like twisted ropes from his wheelchair, and his walk was a drag as he pulled himself along with worn-out school erasers clutched in each hand. Nadu was born this way and despite being 13 years old, he had just received his first wheelchair the day prior to my arrival

The following was a speech given by Sandra Steingraber for the Don’t Frack New York Rally in Albany, August 27, 2012. On this day, 53 years ago, a pregnant college student walked into a hospital in rural Illinois and gave birth to a child. And then she walked out.

For at least the past two decades, Americans have been duped into believing that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize value for its shareholders. That belief, first promoted in business schools, has been absorbed in the media, in academic circles, and in the political realm — even progressives like Al Franken have repeated it as if it were indisputable fact

As the mainstream press frets that the much-touted “economic-recovery” appears to have lost steam, the economic crisis continues to escalate for ordinary people. With official unemployment holding steady at 9.5 percent (real unemployment is much higher), and with the state budget cuts producing yet more tuition increases, a growing phenomenon is sweeping the nation: homeless and hungry college students.

Every summer for the past four years, the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) Ruth Institute has invited college students from across the country to participate in its weekend-long ” It Takes A Family To Raise A Village ” (ITAF) conference in San Diego, CA. According to NOM, the conference is meant to prepare college students to defend “natural marriage” on their campuses by introducing them to a number of prominent anti-gay speakers and activists. This year, NOM expanded its ITAF conference to include recent college graduates in their early twenties

The Democrats have nothing to lose. And everything to gain–especially the health and lives of residents in the coal mining areas of central Appalachia. Calling it “Judy’s plank,” in honor of beloved West Virginia mountaineer Judy Bonds, whose untimely death in 2011 served as a wakeup call to the mounting humanitarian and health care crises from mountaintop removal mining, the Democratic Party platform should officially include a commitment for an immediate moratorium on the devastating form of strip mining at their national convention in Charlotte on September 4th. Ending one of the most blatant civil rights and environmental crimes is not just the right and moral thing to do. It would be a smart move for the Democrats and President Obama, whose recent pander to Big Coal in a bizarre Ohio ad against Romney was rightly denounced by environmentalists and health care advocates as a disgrace

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Doug Fine’s latest book, Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution . Late on the afternoon on a windy (and the blusteriness is important) summer Sunday in 2010, Mendocino County, California, deputies under the command of twice-elected sheriff Tom Allman were dispatched to a Redwood Valley farm, about 20 minutes from the county hub and two-sushi-bar city of Ukiah.